When I read a headline like “Ancient weapons emerge from melting Arctic ice,” three things immediately pop into my mind:

1. Oh f_K, they’ve discovered an ancient spaceship under the polar icecaps which contains Aliens, Predators, Alien-Predators, Terminators, Terminator-Alien-Predators and/or the Da Vinci Code;

2. These things will probably kill all of us as they see us as little more than pawns in an epic game/hunt that has been conducted across the universe for millennia and which we have just reactivated by finding this Arctic trove which should have stayed buried;

3. Lance Henriksen will be involved.

However, all that happened is they found some old caveman spears. *Phew.* Headlines should know better than to scare me like that.

A treasure trove of ancient weapons has emerged from melting ice patches in the Canadian Arctic, revealing hunting strategies thousands of years old.

The weapons, which include a 2,400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years, have been found high in the remote Mackenzie Mountains, a region where Mountain Boreal caribou abound in the summer months.

Dotted with ice patches resulting from accumulation of annual snow that, until recently, remained frozen all year, the mountains have been the caribous’ shelter for millennia.

Seeking relief from the heat and annoying bugs, the animals huddle on the ice patches, becoming an easy target for hunters who recognized this behavior millennia ago.

(Discovery News: Ancient weapons emerge from arctic ice)

(A 24x36 poster of LANCE HENRIKSEN about to take down a perp aka the SWEETEST FREAKING THING IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY)

Via Discover:

People sometimes ask, “Is the universe a black hole?” Or worse, they claim: “The universe is a black hole!” No, it’s not, and it’s worth getting this one straight.

If there’s any quantitative reasoning behind the question (or claim), it comes from comparing the amount of matter within the observable universe to the radius of the observable universe, and noticing that it looks a lot like the relationship between the mass of a black hole and its Schwarzschild radius. That is: if you imagine taking all the stuff in the universe and putting it into one place, it would make a black hole the size of the universe. Slightly more formally, it looks like the the universe satisfies the hoop conjecture, so shouldn’t it form a black hole?

But a black hole is not “a place where a lot of mass has been squeezed inside its own Schwarzschild radius.” It is, as Wikipedia is happy to tell you, “a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape.” The implication being that there is a region outside the black hole from which things could at least imagine escaping to. For the universe, there is no such outside region. So at a pretty trivial level, the universe is not a black hole.

(Discover: The Universe is Not a Black Hole)

(The Black Hole: The worst kid’s science fiction movie of all time other than Captain EO)

Apparently somewhere between thirty seconds to a minute after the opening weekend numbers for Avatar came in, the entirety of Western civilization decided to go 3D, and wholesale convert our malls and living rooms into one gigantic Disneyland of the Damned, like a Michael Bay Transformer changing state from “obnoxious and expensive” into “obnoxious, expensive, and three centimeters from your face.” Not only has Hollywood made 3D nigh-on mandatory for its big releases (presumably to combat file sharing), but 3D televisions are slated to begin rolling out this summer, despite health concerns (apparently they can cause vertigo, seizures and a host of other shocks to our woefully non-3D-adjusted systems). Perhaps it’s Michael Jackson’s revenge from beyond the grave, for barely noticing when he pioneered the technology with Captain EO back in the dark ages of 1986, or 24 BA (Before Avatar) in Hollywood years.

And now, the Internet. Intel Labs’ Sean Koehl recently predicted that the Internet will “go three-dimensional” within five to ten years—the company is currently hard at work developing the technology, touting its potential use for teleconferencing, among other business applications.

But… but. You know as well as I do that that’s not what it’s actually going to be used for.

If Koehl’s timeline bears out, somewhere between 2015 and 2020—right as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Augmented Reality are coming to maturity—we can expect:

Porn. I imagine the nearly-bankrupt porn industry will be all over this so quickly that they’ll just about be able to create an entire virtual reality pocket porniverse which the Global Otaku Diaspora will likely declare permanent residence in and which the rest of the world’s population will likely spend a good chunk of their waking hours in. Expect bedroom and office doors locked.

A constant, endless assault of cats. You will be like a cat lady for all the cats in the whole world, who will be all up in your face, all the time. Guess what’s in your inbox this morning? It’s another 3D video of somebody’s cat. And now it’s in your lap.

A running, inescapable feed of status updates from your friends—imagine the hovering, 3D heads of your online acquaintances popping up when you least expect them to constantly update you as to what they’re having for dinner, how much they hated Robert Pattinson’s directorial debut, or sending you a link to a 3D video of their cat being confused by their 3D computer. The thought of constantly being bothered by twelve-second video clips of the holographic heads of everybody I’ve ever exchanged two words with or been cc’d on an e-mail from, all of whose comments are bound to be equally aggravating and pointless, is enough to prompt a pre-emptive desert homestead. Are we all doomed to become like Jimmy Stewart in a doozie, with all those heads swimming around ours, all the time? Combined with augmented reality, three-dimensional Internet is going to be f___cking unavoidable. And so will everybody you know.

And good god… do we really want a three-dimensional version of Chatroulette? Do we really want to be able to see all of us, all the time, in shuddering, sickening three dimensions? Are we ready for the Slob Singularity, when everybody on the Internet can have the experience of staring directly at everybody else on the Internet; when all of our Doritos-greased faces see each other as one Being; when we all become One All-Slouching, All-Trolling, All-Wanking Consciousness?

I hope we are. Because that’s what’s coming. In glorious 3D.

(Watch Captain EO, It Is the Future: The Horrible, SAN-Depleting Future)

Physicist Stephen Hawking has suggested (in his new documentary series) that aliens almost certainly exist in the universe (by dint of the sheer numbers and probabilities involved)—but that we’d probably be better off not looking for them, since they might eat our poor asses.

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

(Image above is taken from a Bad Astronomer post on a New York Times depiction of aliens from Venus and Mars from 1912.) (He also counters Stephen Hawking here.)

(Times Online: Don’t Talk to Aliens)

(Stephen Hawking: A Briefer History of Time)

UK scientists have successfully created an embryo from the DNA of one man and two women, combining three genetic strands into one. Finally, my science fair project of breeding a Sparkling Dance Beast from the DNA of myself, Tiffany AND Debbie Gibson can take flight!

Embryos containing DNA from a man and two women have been created by scientists at Newcastle University.

They say their research, published in the journal Nature, has the potential to help mothers with rare genetic disorders have healthy children.

The aim is to prevent damaged DNA in mitochondria - the “batteries” which power the cell - from being passed on by the mother.

IVF clinics are not currently permitted to carry out the procedure.

(BBC News: Three-person IVF ‘may prevent inherited disease)

Dear Dangerous Minds, Last week my photo (taken with my camera, by a friend of mine) of me with Stephen Hawking was put up on the internet on a photobomb website without my consent or knowledge and since it has really done the rounds..! I have great respect for the Professor who is a fellow at my college in Cambridge, and having been asked by faculty members at the University to remove this photo, I ask that you delete it from your website ASAP? The original sites have kindly understood that I do not consent to the publication of my photograph on their websites and have since removed it. I would be extremely grateful if you could too! Yours sincerely, James
 
(via Nerdcore and NCOTB)

What he said…
 
thx Thomas Wincek !

 
The Last Supper with scientists: Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Thomas Edison, Aristotle, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin.
 
(via I.Z. Reloaded and Nerdcore)

 
“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating.”  Building A Green Economy, Paul Krugman’s Sunday magazine article in the NYT was hardly that day’s only 60’s-inspired story.

Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again describes how, once again, scientists are looking to psilocybin and other psychedelics as a possible cure for cancer-related depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug and alcohol addiction.

This week’s gathering in San Jose, California, promises to be the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the U.S. in forty years and will include Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.  While psychedelics may indeed bring comfort to people seeking to repair some mind-body schism, Griffiths belongs to the new breed of researchers grappling with their spirit-expanding potential:

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them.  None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.  The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment.  At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Roland Griffiths at TED follows below:

The masked birch caterpillar, as shown in this video, apparently defends its territory by scraping its anus loudly across a leaf. It has anal-scraping duels with other caterpillars. Hm… sounds like every office I’ve ever worked in, art gallery opening I’ve attended, and comments thread in any given blog post on the Internet. The video is oddly mesmerizing.

The masked birch caterpillar creates its own home by weaving leaves together with silk. Once built, it vigorously defends its territory but, like many animals, it prefers to intimidate its rivals before resorting to blows. To display its strength and claim its territory, it drums and scrapes its jaws against the leaf. It also drags its anus across the surface to create a complex scratching noise. This “anal scraping” message seems utterly bizarre, but its origins lie in a far more familiar activity – walking.

Warding a rival off with your anus might seem unseemly to us, but caterpillars that do this turn out to be rather civilised species. The scraping is based on the same walking movements that their ancestors used to chase after rivals. The other parts of their signalling repertoire – drumming and scraping jaws – are ritualised versions of fighting moves like biting, butting and hitting. While their earlier cousins might resort to such fisticuffs, the anal-scrapers conduct their rivalries with all the restraint of Victorian gentlemen.

These signals and their evolution have been decoded by Jaclyn Scott from Carleton University. They a great examples of how ritualised animal communiqués evolve from much simpler actions that have little if anything to do with communication – walking, breathing, hunting and the like. Crickets, for example, sing by rubbing their wings together, which may originally have been done to release pheromones or to prep the wings for flight. The whistling of wind through the feathers of crested pigeons has turned into an alarm. The competitive knee-clicks of eland antelopes are made by tendons that slide as a natural part of their gait.

(Discover: Caterpillars must walk before they can anally scrape)